The Actual News:
Now here’s another blast from the past that I never officially mentioned before…
So in 2006, I was still using LiveJournal for all of my social media needs, and I had discovered a neat little Pokémon-related art project called Pokémonathon. The idea was for artists to draw all 151 Pokémon and share it with everyone on LiveJournal. Since at this point I was a few years separated from PA!, I felt it was a pretty fun idea to get back into making fakes again. Unfortunately, I managed to finish off the Kanto starters (plus one bonus fake) before I got bored with it and stopped. The project technically continued on tunblr after its stint on LJ, but it seems to be dormant at this point.
With all that said, I totally forgot about all this until just recently, when I found copies of the following fakes that I had printed out on my work’s photo machine (I used to work in the Photo department at Longs Drugs/CVS). So after I rediscovered my Pokémonathon fakes, I also realized that I never actually posted them to the site after all this time… so here they are!
As you can notice, I started getting a bit lazy once I got to the Squirtle line. Just FYI, Squirtle’s picture is a reference to Mike Jones, specifically from his music video “Back Then“. (Still tippin’ on fo’ fo’s wrapped in fo’ vogues)
Other little jokes and references include:
- Ivysaur’s big fat bud should be pretty self evident
- The Charmander line was, at that point, the best Sumiyoshi Kizuki-style art I pulled off.
- Charmeleon’s attack, “Cyuzi Flame”, came from my old “To Be A Fake Master” guide which gave attack name suggestions. That said, I think that name idea in particular came from either PMX or RyoShinX from back in the day… but I legit forgot who it was specifically. Sorry! ㅠ_ㅠ
- Charizard itself was the latest iteration of my “Shivan Dragon/Charizard” mixup, which I’ve done a few times before
- Wartortle was based on nose art mostly seen in World War 2; in this case “Make Wartortle, Not Love” seemed to be an appropriately hawkish statement to make.
- Wartortle’s attack, “Shell Shock“, was a term used to describe PTSD back during World War 1; it likewise seemed appropriate given Wartortle’s whole war deal
- I forget what inspired me to turn Blastoise into a tattoo, apart from it being a sort of natural consequence of Wartortle’s WW2-era nose art (seeing as the US established a base on Okinawa by 1945)
- That said, “Bite Torrent” is a reference to “BitTorrent“, both in name and function. Namely, the ability to source energy from your Benched Pokémon is similar to how the bittorrent system of downloading works.
That’s pretty much everything I have to share about these fakes. That said, I did also make a Missingno. fake card for Pokémonathon, seeing as Missingno. is still one of my favorite “Pokémon“, and the Pokémonathon project didn’t have (m)any Missingno. pictures. However, all I did was update my original Missingno. fake using better quality text and the picture I drew for my GenCon Indy 2003 “Light Missingno” fake. So for the sake of completeness, here’s the completely unoriginal Missingno. fake card, which actually also currently resides on the Bulbapedia article about fan-made fake cards!
And… that’s it! I hope you enjoyed a look back at some of my earlier fakes, and this might be the last of my old fakes before I finally get around to making NEW fakes. Huzzah! Good times.